


Till all our own be won

by Lilliburlero



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Corpses, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 15:49:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1823863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the battle of Shrewsbury, Henry reflects on his son's injury, its treatment, and the stability of his realm.</p><p>*</p><p>to angevin2's prompt: 'Henry IV, "what happened doesn't change anything"', and as a belated birthday gift (though it's not exactly full of festivity, sorry!)</p><p>*</p><p>Note: period-typical Islamophobic language and attitudes, canonical character death and a brief description of decaying human remains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Till all our own be won

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angevin2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angevin2/gifts).



For some reason, watching the surgeon make his obeisance, Henry thought of his new-wedded Joan: her reticent, controlled comportment, her awareness, without vulgar emphasis, of her ability to make the right impression.  He had been right to marry her, despite the salient inconveniences of the match.  

Henry raised Bradmore with a small, impatient gesture.  He had retained the man’s services, on and off, for three or four years now.  Henry thought he liked him.  His manner was scrupulously correct, yet almost insouciant, with a way of throwing away his wittiest lines over his interlocutor’s shoulder.  Brown skin and black tightly-curled hair encouraged puns on the second syllable of his name, though his accent was all Yorkshire and he was a cleric in minor orders.  But his round, rolling _deo voluntas_ , _deo voluntas_ did indeed have some of the intimate, disposable quality with which the Saracen was wont to deploy _insh’allah_ , as if he were that little more familiar with the will of God than most men.  On reflection, Henry supposed that was because he _was_.

Bradmore’s account of the prince’s condition, impressively lucid on the day of the surgery, had become in the five since almost incantatory.  The usual resilience of early manhood allied to a constitution nearly indomitable as befitting a such a bud of chivalry _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ the wound flushed with a solution of wine and honey _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ elder splints and flax wads _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ ointment compounded of flour, barley, honey and turpentine _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ shorten the splints and wads _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ no sign of spasm or fever _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ rub neck muscles morning and evening with unguent oil _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ still in much pain and unable to speak but conscious and bearing it with most Christian fortitude _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ able to reduce the dose of sedative _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ most hopeful of recovery _deo voluntas_ _deo voluntas_ hopeful hopeful―

Henry offered his response, by now as reflexive and invariable as _et cum spiritu tuo_ to _dominus vobiscum._

‘Perhaps our eldest son will be thus encouraged to keep his visor _down_ on the field of battle.’

Bradmore gave the tense wry smile of a man who thinks it important to think up a new reply to old news.  Henry went to see for himself.

Harry was three or four inches too long for any couch made for normally-sized men; his own, bespoke daybed was making its slow way towards him on an ox-cart, trundling along a dry, rutted, Shropshire road. The necessary accommodation had been made with a low stool. The effect was languid, especially unsettling combined with the boy’s Angevin colouring.  His head was thrown back, eyes rolling, and everything between those organs and his large, naked feet shrouded in linen, but at the sound of Henry’s greeting one bony pale hand flapped out of the sheets, folding up and down in an infantile wave―or in a morbid one, the hopeless, convulsive grasping of a man who will never hold a sword again, but has days to live.

Sixteen hundred dead men.  Not a bad tally, worth it to secure a realm, but a decent-sized townsworth of dead men nonetheless.  All alive one July noon, all dead by dusk.

Dead blacksmith at the forge, dead miller at the mill, dead host and drawers in the pub, dead marshals and ostlers in the stables, dead butcher, dead tailor, dead fuller, dead apprentices, dead priest in the church, dead mercer, dead weaver, dead potter, dead scrivener, dead carpenter, dead saddler, dead cooks, dead fletcher, dead cooper, dead shoemaker, dead baker, dead mason, dead chandler, dead tanner, dead currier, dead plasterer, dead dyer, dead founder, dead milliner, dead pinner, dead painter, dead labourers, dead lorimer, dead shearsmen, dead tilemaker, dead nailer, dead barber, dead apothecary, dead bookbinder, dead hosier, dead dead dead dead dead dead, still at their business but dead.  

But not, not yet, a dead prince.

Henry nodded at Bradmore.  ‘Very good.  We’re pleased with his progress and your work.’  

‘Thank you, my lord. Both will continue apace, _deo voluntas_.’

Bradmore didn’t have now―and had never had―the look of a man who feared his fate should the Prince of Wales die on his watch.    

‘What happened―all this―doesn’t change anything.’  Henry said thickly, not sure what he meant exactly, but dimly aware he had said the same words three years before, over a coffin opened to reveal a corpse three or four inches too long for it; its head snapped back, the face full of black blood and crushed into the top plane of the rough box. When it was a man it had been beautiful almost beyond words, but the decayed husk was ordinarily foul.  The stage of bloat was passed and the body reduced to more than emaciation; it stank nonetheless. Henry had looked away, into a living face, weathered hard and brown, framed in lank black hair, as clammily, pathetically self-satisfied as Bradmore’s was self-forgetfully dignified.

The surgeon bowed. ‘No, my lord―it simply confirms God’s will for your bloodline and for England.’

Henry had no idea how to formulate either admiration or hatred for a man of such low degree, but he felt both.  He went to the tower chamber that served him as a study, and had his secretary draw up an article to employ Bradmore as official surgeon to the royal household, to expire only upon the king's death, or his man's.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This plays fairly fast and loose with history, as ever. 
> 
> John Bradmore was the innovative surgeon who performed the state-of-the art 15th-century maxillo-facial surgery that saved the life of the future Henry V after he was injured at the Battle of Shrewsbury. His connection with Henry IV dates, as this story states, from about 1399, but he had probably already been retained by the royal household on a more-or-less permanent basis in 1402, a year before the battle. He died a year before his employer, in 1412.
> 
> The scene of Exton presenting the body of Richard II to Henry is Shakespearean rather than historical.


End file.
